The Salvation Army, Amarillo College, Don & Sybil Harrington Foundation and Panhandle WorkSource have joined to create Campus Kitchen, a food-service safety certification program under way on AC's East Campus.

The Salvation Army sought establishment of the 12-week course to provide more employment possibilities for clients who are homeless or at risk of losing their homes, board member John Wheir said.

The Salvation Army referred four of the seven people now enrolled in the course to get "basic building blocks" for a cooking career, he said.

"The students are going to be coming out of this more managerial in nature," said instructor Chuck King, former food service director for Cal Farley's Boys Ranch. "When they walk out of this class, they're going to be of major value to the local employer.

"In the past, (food-service businesses) hired anybody off the street that had almost little or no training. You pay them minimum wage and you have to teach them everything. But you're not going to have to train (Campus Kitchen students) in any basics."

Campus Kitchen took a couple of years and a lot of collaboration to bring to reality, Wheir said.

AC has provided King, the curriculum, and East Campus classroom and kitchen space, supplementing the cost with continuing education funds the college receives from the state to support work force training efforts, said Jeff Doiron, director of AC's Center for Continuing Healthcare Education.

The Salvation Army has committed $40,000 to $50,000 over the program's initial three years, Doiron said.

And the Harrington Foundation contributed $75,000 seed money, said Jim Allison, chief executive officer of the Amarillo Area Foundation, which administers Harrington funds.

"Our interest was in assisting ... homeless or near homeless persons in getting job skills," Allison said. "I think, if this works, it could be a really model job-skills training program for the entire region."

Panhandle WorkSource, formerly called Texas Workforce Centers, paid the $675 class tuition and fees for six of the seven students enrolled, using state work force training money, said Trent Morris, coordinator of the Panhandle WorkSource One-Stop Program.

The Campus Kitchen class now under way and subsequent classes set to begin in June and September are open to general students as well as those referred by an agency. Damaris Schlong, AC dean of work force and economic development, hopes restaurants, senior- and child-care programs and other food-service institutions will enroll employees deemed prospective management material or sponsor tuition for at-risk students recommended for the course.

Business sponsorship and community support is crucial to Campus Kitchen's longevity, she said.

That's where lessons learned by Fare Start, a similar culinary training program created in 1992, can help, Wheir said.

The Seattle nonprofit has placed about 80 percent of its 1,500 graduates in jobs at restaurants, grocery delis, caterers and other food service entities, he said.

"These were people who had lost everything and were on their last cycle of life almost," Wheir said.

Fare Start began as a community kitchen "focusing on providing nutritious meals out to the community in an efficient way to low-income child-care programs, senior centers, homeless shelters, Head Start programs," said David Carleton.

Once the nonprofit's community relations director, Carleton now runs a spinoff, Kitchens With Mission, to advise other programs across the country on how to follow in Fare Start's footprints. Carleton is working with organizers of the Amarillo program as well as programs in Portland, Ore.; Boise, Idaho; Yakima, Wash.; southern New Hampshire; Baltimore; Long Beach, Calif.; and Phoenix.

Fare Start has grown to include a restaurant, two cafes, an event catering business and a Starbucks-sponsored barista program that teaches homeless youths the skills needed to work in one of the chain's stores or other coffeehouses, Carleton said.

But the nonprofit's success depends on the relationships it forged with other entities, contracting to cook the meals those entities serve, he said.

"What we've got in Amarillo is a great launch of a training program," he said. "What we need to build is the operations and the community contracts. It requires support from the community and it requires partners to step up.

"In and around Amarillo, there are any number of organizations or churches or shelters providing meals for individuals. Typically, they're doing it in a way that doesn't have high nutritional value on a consistent basis and in a way that is highly inefficient. Those meals are something that give us the opportunity to train students every day."